I understand this may be an unpopular take here on HN (it certainly isn't in the real world), but but I can't see these people as anything other than pathetic. Go out, get a hobby, and meet real people. Jesus christ.
To get a hobby takes time. It's not an overnight action. You may dedicate time and find that after a month the hobby you took up isn't yours. If your stuck in a mental mindset this hurts.
Even when you find a hobby to enjoy you then need to dedicate time to build a rapport to those who are already established in that hobby. There is a large outer circle you need to navigate. People will bat eyes at you, may greet you at first but won't form relations.
Why would they waste energy on you when you could disappear in a months time? A hobby takes months of constant effort and mental strain while your being subconsciously judged to make a connection.
Make a wrong joke, say the wrong thing at the wrong time and you can jeopardise the whole effort.
We currently live in a state of defence and that if your mental image doesn't strike the other party the percentage is high that they will be hesitant to make rapport with you.
To those with difficulties such as anxiety, introverted and the likes its even more hard.
Taking upon a hobby to improve yourself is a good way to go but to actually make friends and the likes; easier said then done.
It sucks making friends, I've been attending a new sword fencing club for three months now. I have nothing in common with anyone there, I was acquaintances with one of the fencers and that some how snowballed. Not understanding why, I now have to navigate around them. Which for me is now a mental strain; when all I wish to do is bout and fence. It doesn't always turn out to be.
Well, I have to spend about 7 hours a day inside on a computer, as I'm sure you do too! I have to spend my time doing 'something' while Jenkins does its thing :)
PS. I'd say it's more 'exasperation' at the scenario than annoyance at the words. We could sit here playing reductio ad absurdum all day, but I don't think it's useful to do so.
Judging by the comments this seems like a very popular take. But I really wish we could move from "wow I hate that" to thinking through the right response, because it's likely going to be our children forming these relationships very soon.
These tools aren't for helping people's mental health though, are they. They are becoming attached to fantasy beings and sad when they disappear.
That is the OPPOSITE of healthy, and it's clearly having a dramatically negative effect on their lives.
These aren't tools to help people get better, they are gamed to make it more appealing to the user than the real world. That is damaging to society, and if you want to use my argument (like a few of your siblings have), like I'm saying 'Just get healthy!', go wild, but that's obviously not my argument.
You're coming from an angle that I've never had depression or struggled with anxiety. I actually do know how to conquer these things, and it's done by putting yourself out there into uncomfortable situations and seeing what happens.
> Go out, get a hobby, and meet real people. Jesus christ.
It's a bit more aggressive than it needs to be, but in spirit it's less "get healthy" and more "start doing something about the sht situation". Which is hard, nobody denies this, but, in the end, all advice one can give is going to boil down to "start doing something to change it".
But it's not flippant, it's genuine, that is the answer for these people. It is really that simple (for 99% of people). Yes there will be outliers that this doesn't work for, but those are outliers.
HN comments always give the shitty outlier response whenever anyone says something like I'm saying. (e.g. 'What if I'm quadraplegic and autistic', etc) It's a shitty contrarian take that I don't have time for.
Edit: for a literal example someone has posted about old people sitting in care homes and how this is a great tool for them. Completely ignoring the fact that they're in a care home full of people, in a city. It's shit takes like this that make me regret posting anything, because some HN wanker will have some shitty contrary take, because they think this is an argument 'to win' or some nonsense like that.
Go out, get a hobby (or many), you will meet lots of new people, and some of those people will become your friends.
People just like to make excuses. I have childhood friends who do the same. Sit at home playing video games all day, no other friends, no job, no life. Waste of a life.
They live in their mind, and their mind is a prison.
These tools can be used for good, but used in this way (AI girlfriends), I can't see it as anything but a problem.
The route to good mental health generally starts with parents with good mental health then a social circle of people with good mental health.
This begs the question, what if you were not born with that privilege?
Just tell them to go online and look up resources on better mental health? Yea, this is how you end up being an incel because telling people "It's not your fault, it's everyone else's fault" is a very effective trap huge parts of populations fall in (especially those with bad mental health).
Oh, the route to better mental health is the US healthcare system. Your insurance is paying for that right?
So the route to better mental health is connections with other people... which you don't have, and you don't have the internal tools to build. Especially without fear of rejection.
But hey, this conversation isn't about you right, you have perfect mental health? In fact with that good mental health you go out and help other people that are stuck in traps? Or do you do your own list of things focusing on the next step you're taking on your hedonistic treadmill?
It's always easy to point out how someone else is obviously wrong and how they shouldn't fall in that trap, but when you see hundreds of thousands to millions of people falling in that trap then something isn't as obvious as you think.
> Yea, this is how you end up being an incel because telling people "It's not your fault, it's everyone else's fault" is a very effective trap huge parts of populations fall in
Fully agreed, but, to be honest, the following:
> The route to good mental health generally starts with parents with good mental health then a social circle of people with good mental health.
> So the route to better mental health is connections with other people... which you don't have, and you don't have the internal tools to build. Especially without fear of rejection.
... reads a lot like "it's not your fault, it's the circumstances/somebody elses".
>reads a lot like "it's not your fault, it's the circumstances/somebody elses".
Well, yes, that's how circumstances typically work. I know the rugged individualists are busy launching themselves to space via their own bootstraps, but average person can become trapped in the life they live pretty easily.
Meanwhile societies that actually want to move into the future while minimizing the terrible outcomes will have programs to avoid it, such as social security so we don't have to watch grandma and grandpa die on the side of the road of old age. Or in this case, some people might be able to receive help that is outside of your heterodoxy.
> I know the rugged individualists are busy launching themselves to space via their own bootstraps, but average person can become trapped in the life they live pretty easily.
True.
> Meanwhile societies that actually want to move into the future while minimizing the terrible outcomes will have programs to avoid it, such as social security so we don't have to watch grandma and grandpa die on the side of the road of old age.
You might be surprised to learn that I fully agree.
> Or in this case, some people might be able to receive help that is outside of your heterodoxy.
Which would be perfect! The question being discussed is: Is an AI chatbot really "help"? Especially when we're not talking about absolute edge cases, in which case we both agree that the answer is "yes".
I supoose it depends on how its implemented. Mental healthcare is less accesible than ever while at the same time the population is being squeezed in a way where most have less energy than ever before in recent memory to deal with other peoples emotional labor. This means AI might be a useful tool for helping people feel heard and supported, which is often enough to get people motivated to make a change. However, if capitalistic interest is behind it I anticipate it will result in a product that holds your short term mental health hostage through a subscription service randsom. The problem isn't Ai, it's profit incentive in a field which is inherently perverse to profit from.
Honestly, I think people who have explicitly replaced children with pets are kind of pathetic. I'm not condemning anyone or demanding that others make the choices I have, but I find something very sad about those "I love my grand-dog" bumper stickers. Perhaps those people are perfectly happy, but I can't help but see a huge gap between what a grandchild can provide vs. your child having a dog that you love.
I personally don't, and I think it's because pets make demands of you. Walking a dog, making sure your cat is up to date on vaccines, feeding your fish, etc. These all require some level of sacrifice, which strikes me as inherently un-pathetic.
Which points the way to a new Turing test. Something like: "Can an AI credibly make a demand of the user?"
Right. But if AI girlfriend doesn't make demands to you, then it's just a boring novelty, isn't it? Why engage with something like that, it's like cheating in a computer game. How it can make you happy?
I feel the problem you paint will solve itself. It doesn't seem to me it will have worse outcomes than computer gaming.
Of course that would be the best solution. It is just that these are risk-averse and socially shy men who tended to either not go to the school dance or if they did were glued to the walls, not getting picked by any girl and not in possession of enough testicular fortitude to go and ask one because (shock and horror) she might (would) say no and start giggling with her friends about that "weirdo" wanting to dance with her.
Fast forward a decade and there was #MeToo which meant that even glancing at a woman could get them ostracised for being the creeps they already thought they were while those girls from school put up Tinder profiles where they all competed for the top 10% of men - looks like a movie star, makes a zillion $currency_units, might be a bastard who already has a number of girls but that doesn't matter.
These ´AI girlfriends' and 'AI boyfriends' (I guess those exist as well) are just another sign of the way dating and sexuality have been dehumanised, commercialised and in some ways ideologically weaponised.
If this is what the sexual revolution has brought us it is time to rethink the premise of the concepts. In some ways that is already happening - viz. the 'trad wife' phenomenon - but the real solution would be to find a way to retain the good bits from said sexual revolution while getting rid of the parts which led us [1] to where we are now. Something which would appeal not only to those of a more conservative bent, i.e. a way which also appeals to most women [2].
Our future is at stake, quite literally: no relationships means no children means no future. This does not mean that children will not be born any more, it just means that they won't be our children who carry along our traditions and cultures - those traditions and cultures which we claim to value where people are born equal with the same rights, where men and women are equal under the law, where freedom of consciousness, religion and speech are guaranteed to a differing but mostly large extent, where those who happen to be romantically attracted to their own sex do not get thrown off buildings or sentenced to prison or 'converted' or chemically castrated. We fought quite hard to arrive where we were a few decades ago, by no means perfect - perfection is the enemy of good - but certainly better than before and also better than most other places so it does not make sense to throw all those gains to the wind in the name of... what, exactly?
[1] as in 'those parts of the world where the sexual revolution took place and had these detrimental effects'
[2] for just another proof of the fact that men and women are not interchangeable it suffices to look at the difference in political opinions between 'the average man' and 'the average woman'. Yes, there are 'liberal' men. Yes, there are 'conservative' women. That does not negate the fact that women on average lean more towards 'liberalism' while men tend to lean more towards 'conservatism'.
> It is just that these are risk-averse and socially shy men who tended to either not go to the school dance or if they did were glued to the walls, not getting picked by any girl and not in possession of enough testicular fortitude to go and ask one because (shock and horror) she might (would) say no and start giggling with her friends about that "weirdo" wanting to dance with her.
I understand that what I wrote is much (much!) easier to say rather than do, but well... there's only one way to find out :).
> These ´AI girlfriends' and 'AI boyfriends' (I guess those exist as well) are just another sign of the way dating and sexuality have been dehumanised, commercialised and in some ways ideologically weaponised.
Interesting take. I'm lucky that I've been in a great relationship since before hyper internet dating became a thing (tinder, bumble, etc)
> We fought quite hard to arrive where we were a few decades ago, by no means perfect - perfection is the enemy of good - but certainly better than before and also better than most other places so it does not make sense to throw all those gains to the wind in the name of... what, exactly?
I think the new thing here is that it is not "shareholder profits" but "stakeholder benefits" which are supposed to drive decisions, raising the ESG score and thus the likelihood of being able to procure loans and land investments.
Your second footnote doesn't follow at all. I'm sure the star-bellied sneetches would be far more likely to be in favor of a star-belly supremacist platform as compared with the star-less. The right consistently embraces overt sexism to appeal to their religious zealot base, so it should be no surprise that women tend away from them.
Could you restate what you're trying to tell in normal unbiased language? It would make it easier (or 'possible') to react to your statement. Take out the labels and expletives and come back with what's left (if any).
I'm sorry, I assumed everybody was familiar with the classic Dr. Seuss story "The Sneetches", which is about a race of bird things where some have stars on their bellies and some don't but are otherwise indistinguishable but have a segregated society that devolves into chaos when some guy makes a machine that can add or remove stars. The whole thing is an allegory for racism, but it applies here:
You state that women shying away from the right is evidence of fundamental sexual differences, when in fact the right has made a point of adopting anti-women positions which make them unappealing to all but the most self-sabotaging.
> I assumed everybody was familiar with the classic Dr. Seuss story "The Sneetches"
Dr. Seuss is not really part of a Dutch or Swedish upbringing. We do get a whiff every now and then but the Sneetches? Nope.
> You state that women shying away from the right is evidence of fundamental sexual differences
You mistake correlation with causation. I state that women on average are more liberal leaning while men on average lean more towards conservatism. I did not state why this was so, only that it is so. As to why women on average lean more towards liberalism I suspect it does not have much to do with your statements about 'the right' but is related to the fact that women on average score significantly higher on the agreeableness and compassion scales than men do [1], two traits which are more prevalent in those who tend towards liberalism [2].
On the subject of 'the right' having adopted 'anti-women positions' I´ll state that it depends on your political opinion as to whether those positions are 'anti-women' or not. The fact that there are plenty of women on 'the right' who do not agree with your claim should give you cause to doubt the absolute veracity of your claim - unless you also insist that women on 'the right' are somehow not informed about what 'the right' has in mind for them? If you think it through a bit you'll find that it is your own (or your own community's/your own group's) political bias which informs this statement. Simone de Beauvoir [3] made a statement in a 1975 interview [4] with Betty Friedan [5] which clearly shows what I mean:
“No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one… In my opinion, as long as the family and the myth of the family and the myth of maternity and the maternal instinct are not destroyed, women will still be oppressed.”
A woman of conservative persuasion most likely considers that statement to be proof of the authoritarian and revolutionary bent of these liberals or, to restate this in your terminology, 'the fact that the left has made a point of adopting anti-women positions which make them unappealing to all but the most self-sabotaging'.
This is one of those topics where proponents will not show up in comment because of the stigma.
Realistically there's a whole sector of male society that are not able to find real partners.
Is it really that depressing to you that people would rather talk to their favourite person than some lady shouting about how shoelaces are racist and misogynist?
This is like the debate over welfare and free-riders.
There are some people who need welfare to get by. They cannot provide for themselves. But once a welfare program is created, there will be a different number of people who don't need it but decide to live off it anyway.
AI companions are the same deal. There are definitely people who can't socialize. But once you invent AI companions, some number of people who could learn to socialize never will.
So let me flip that. What about the dark side of society that can't express themselves legally or physically in whatever their jurisdiction. Those people may be able to gain some facsimile of intimacy instead of execution etc.
Not sure how that fits into the welfare scenario though.
This article is about companion AIs but a similar issue will probably arise around conversational AIs for older and lonely people.
I guess this is a very individual decision, but I can’t see how you can devise someone to just sit lonely in an (maybe not so great) elderly care home who finds comfort in chatting with an AI to “just find other friends”. For some people it’s that or nothing.
Ahh yes. I will fight labels using my labels. Then it's simply a label race to the bottom.
My partner recently bought a label maker and I find it quite entertaining how obsessed he is with stereotyping our objects in the house.
I will probably never understand the duplicitous logic that comes with sexual identity and why being attracted to the same sex somehow not only labels you but also means you become an advocate for labels.
Like if I call someone a hypocrite I’m not labeling them, I’m expressing something about them that would be tedious to do in complete sentences.
In this case I’m looking for something like someone-who-complains-about-things-only-caused-by-their-complaining-about-them. There’s probably something Greek. Like a complaining ouroboros.
A pointless endeavour, I agree. So shall we just do away with the labels and agree that people are inscrutable entities beyond the definition of a simple label?
We are but one possible reality seeded by some or other starting inputs, with no say in the choices we make. Fated to execute instructions at the whim of some entity we can't comprehend from within the confines of dimensional space.
Regardless of how you view my preceding comments, you have to admit the dating game for single straight men is a nightmare right now.
Source: believe it or not I have a lot of straight friends and one of them literally recently got robbed by a hooker via tinder. They had a card machine and everything. So tell me what the harm is in letting those people discover more about themselves via a fancy autocorrect, at least they aren't out there getting robbed by hookers.
We have 'freedom of expression' and case law, but these things end up having to go to court, so I think it being written in a constitution would be better.
Writing things in a constitution doesn't save you from having to litigate them; the US constitution is constantly subject to litigation.
(Not sure how true that is of non-anglosphere countries, though. There's occasional German constitutional litigation, but it doesn't seem quite so critical to politics there)
There isn't an easy shortcut. Experts exist for reasons. Just like Doctors and other specialists, find a good expert you trust and evaluate their evaluation of the topic.
Doctors rely on an enormous number of heuristics and shortcuts exactly like this.
My wife teaches doctors, and so much of what she does is giving them rules of thumb much like this one.
edit: I want to note that I'm pretty ambivalent on the actual advice of the article, just commenting that doctors in my experience have a truly astounding collection of rules of thumb
An expert in a field tends to be an expert of the rules of thumb, the references to consult when the rule of thumb doesn't deliver the desired results, and the nuances and exceptions that are the art part of 'science and useful arts' for their field.
"Keep at it, it can be frustrating at times but if you keep studying and practicing how to become a better developer, you will become one"
There are no shortcuts in life. You need to work at it. Cognizant practice got me there, and I think it will get you there, too.
I get people asking me how to become a programmer all the time -- and I always say the same thing: You can't talk about it, you need to do it. You need to write programs, writing software will make you a better programmer.
Have opinions on how to write good software, be open about these opinions, but also be aware that they could be bad opinions, misinformed, or lacking greater context.
Can you give an example of 'shitty code'? We've got murmurs of Go being adopted by some teams so if you have first hand experience it'd be really useful
As a counter anecdote, I've worked at two large companies with monsterous Go codebases and they are totally fine to maintain. There is no justification to the claim that Java repos are "easier to maintain" by the above commenter, as we have decade-old Go codebases that doing great.
I'm just as fast/productive in Go (8 years of experience) as I am in Python (13 years of experience), but the resulting code is:
* more maintainable (enforced typing vs typehints+mypy)
* faster (compiled vs interpreted)
* consistently structured / opinionated (until recently we didn't have generics, which meant that engineers often had to do things the "boring and verbose way" instead of the "clever and concise way" which, though frustrating short-term, has proven to be much better for maintainability long-term.
There's no reason that your company can't support multiple languages. Uber has large Go monorepos, Java monorepos, Python monorepos, etc. and they all work in harmony and with different requirements.
Eh. Yes and no. I have not worked on a team that enforces that and I do agree with using them for short functions with 1 or 2 types. I do this in python as well
I have never seen this done in enterprise Go code, and I don't think it's been strongly recommended since the mid 2010's?
For small functions where you can see everything in a single page, this is fine. Though I think they should always be avoided except the most common cases (`i` for index) because keeping a codebase grep-able is a high priority. Using constant, verbose variable names can make tracing through a codebase much easier.
I'm not autistic, and I have the same issue with arbitrary rules, airports or other security theatre are a classic example. I'm sure there are many people out there that feel the same way
Security theater is one of those things everyone is familiar with. I'm talking about the more subtle rules. I'm a fan of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" because Larry David is always rebelling against these rules or making up new rules that actually make sense ("chat and cut is not allowed").
To give you an example from the show that actually happened to me, I went into the men's room. The stalls were full so I used the wheel chair stall. I didn't see anyone in a wheel chair in the building. I got yelled at by someone, a 'rules and order' person, who claimed I was never under any circumstances to use the wheel chair stall if I wasn't in a wheel chair, which is stupid. There are a lot of rules like that and neurotypical people just accept, but I can't.
Non-wheelchair-bound, neurotypical people happily use those stalls too because it's not an actual rule (at least anywhere I've ever been). At best, if an actual wheelchair-bound person shows up in line you let them use it first because that's courteous. It's also often used by people with small kids because it affords room for them to go in there with the kids to make sure they don't make a mess or help them clean themselves (if they aren't quite potty trained yet).
Neurotypical people are as aware as anyone else that many (if not most) rules are arbitrary and not all rules make sense and that not all people insisting a rule exists are worth listening to.
Thanks for this. It's hard for me to distinquish between the spirit of a rule and someone telling me I'm not following the rule because I'm not following their interpretation of the rule. I know I don't think like other people so if someone tells me I'm not thinking like other people I tend to believe them. My intuition tells me I'm doing ok, but need to improve my perception of when a person is being unreasonable and let it go.
That was my biggest problem with jail and prison. As Piper's lawyer told her in Orange is the New Black, prison is "chickenshit rules enforced by chickenshit people."
Wow, what a fantastic website. Thank you! It's great that it has other languages, as I'm fairly decent in English, but given that it's real examplse, and it highlights the text... brilliant design choice
